Mario Kart 64 Reloaded is a retexturing project for Mario Kart 64. It uses my own personal fork of the famous Rice Video plugin, introducing three additional features :
Sky color modification
In Mario Kart 64, the sky is not a texture but a background diffuse color, therefore it is not possible to alter it with the standard rice video plugin. Mario Kart 64 Reloaded plugin dynamically updates the background color every time it is rendered to enable sky color modification
Animated textures
Rice video allows to replace a texture by another one, which is fine but i wanted to go one step further. Mario Kart 64 Reloaded plugin is able to take one texture and replace it with several ones to animate a static image and bring more life to the game
Polymorphic textures
As stated previously, with rice video you have 1 base texture = 1 texture replacement. In Mario Kart 64 Reloaded, the same base texture can be found in multiple maps with different replacements, allowing to give each map its very own design and reduce redundancy
Mushroom cup
Flower cup
Star cup
Special cup
Win
1 - Download the zip file containing everything you need (emulator, plugins, game, and texture pack)
2 - Extract the Project64 directory contained inside zip to C:\
3 - Run C:\Project64\Project64.exe
4 - Launch Mario Kart 64 (U) rom
5 - Play
1 - Download the zip file containing everything you need (emulator, plugins, game, and texture pack)
2 - Extract the Project64 directory contained inside zip to your destination folder
3 - Run {YOUR_DESTINATION_FOLDER}\Project64\Project64.exe
4 - Click on menu Options > Settings
5 - Go to "Plugins" and make sure the selected video plugin is Mario Kart 64 Reloaded and the audio plugin is Jabo's DirectSound
6 - Click OK to save settings
7 - Click on menu Options > Configure Graphics Plugin...
8 - Go to tab Texture enhancement and make sure the Load hi-res textures if available is checked. You can also check Cache hi-res textures if you want to make the game run faster
9 - Click OK to save settings
10 - Click on menu File > Choose ROM Directory...
11 - Select {YOUR_DESTINATION_FOLDER}\Project64\Roms and click OK
12 - Click on menu File > Refresh ROM List
The Mario Kart 64 (U) rom should appear in the list
5 - Extract the texture pack inside the hires_texture directory
The following picture illustrates what you should have once steps 1 to 5 are complete :
6 - Open your emulator options or settings. Example for Project64 :
7 - Go to the Plugins options panel and make sure the selected video plugin is Mario Kart 64 Reloaded and the audio plugin is Jabo's DirectSound. Example for Project64 :
8 - Click "OK" to save settings
9 - Open the video plugin settings inside your emulator. Example for Project64 :
10 - Go to tab Texture enhancement and make sure the Load hi-res textures if available is checked. You can also check Cache hi-res textures if you want to make the game run faster
11 - Click OK to save settings
12 - Download the Mario Kart 64 (U) rom and put it inside your rom directory
10 - Refresh the rom list inside your emulator. Example for Project 64 :
14 - Launch Mario Kart 64 (U) rom
15 - Play
The install presented in the tuto is bundled with Project64, but you can also download a 1964-bundled install here
You can download the Mario Kart 64 Reloaded plugin source code here
A "debugger" version of the plugin is available here if you need more advanced features like runtime logs or single texture dumping
If you are unhappy with the audio and/or input plugins, you can download other plugins here here
Does this work on linux ?There is no .so version of the Mario Kart 64 Reloaded plugin, so you cannot use it directly inside Mupen for example, but it was successfully tested with Wine
Does this work on everdrive 64 ?I did not test it but unless you can define by yourself the video plugin to use at runtime in everdrive, probably not
It works but the game is really slow... what could be the problem ?Some people have experienced slow game when using specific audio plugins (1964 Audio plugin, for instance) and it is strongly advised to use Jabo's DirectSound for the audio plugin. Also, you can try to cache the textures inside the video plugin options (see advanced install)
The emulator often crashes when I close itThe longer the game runs, the greater you may encounter this issue : this is because the video plugin sometimes (often) fails to release the memory resources acquired at run time during the short delay given to it for that task upon exit. This should not be too problematic though since it doesn't seem to affect the game at run time.
Can i use the standard Rice Video plugin instead of the Mario Kart 64 Reloaded plugin ?It should work, but you won't have the modifications detailed in the "Presentation" part of the website
Do you plan to retexture the battle mode maps ?Not at the moment, but maybe I will if many people ask for it
Do you plan to retexture the characters ?No, because unfortunately, retexturing characters is a really tedious task considering the way this part of the game was programmed
Are there any other good texture packs for Mario Kart 64 out there ?You can try Kerber texture pack for a HD version of the original textures which is quite good and also BFrancois texture pack for a Super Mario Kart like texture pack
Did not find an answer to your question ? Just contact me so I can help you
Feel free to email me if you have any further inquiry about the project : just
